Developers related stories

Inspur and Khronos Member Intel announced partnership on an R&D project -- the Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) accelerator card F10A, at the SC16. This is a high density and high performance FPGA card based on OpenCL.

Using OpenCL, programmers can utilize FPGAs with C, or other familiar high- level programming languages, instead of hardware-specific language. At SC16, one of the major issues for discussion is optimizing OpenCL kernels for high-performance computing.

Today sees the emergence of ROCm (Radeon Open Compute Platform) 1.3, which brings the official release of the LLVM native compiler and support for AMD’s current Polaris family of 14nm GPUs (Radeon RX 480, RX 470, RX 460). Also hopping aboard is support for OpenCL 1.2+. More specifically, ROCm 1.3 support the OpenCL 1.2 runtime along with the OpenCL 2.0 kernel language.

Intel SDK for OpenCL Applications 2016 R3 is now available for download. This update adds support for new OSes and platforms, more performance analysis features and various SDK improvements including: OpenCL 2.1 development environment with the experimental CPU-only runtime for OpenCL 2.1; SPIR-V generation support with Intel® Code Builder for OpenCL offline compiler and Kernel Development Framework including textual representation of SPIR-V binaries.

Nimbix announced the availability of the Xilinx SDAccel development environment for on-demand development, testing, and deployment of FPGA-accelerated workflows in the Nimbix Cloud, powered by JARVICE. The SDAccel development environment combines the industry's first architecturally optimizing compiler supporting any combination of OpenCL, C, and C++ kernels, along with libraries, development boards and industry standard development and run‐time experience for FPGAs.

After informing us last week about the availability of the Release Candidate (RC) version of the first point release of Mesa 13.0.0, as well as about Mesa 13.0.1's upcoming launch on November 13, 2016, Collabora's Emil Velikov released the final version today.

NVIDIA introduces the VK_NVX_device_generated_commands (DGC) Vulkan extension, which allows the GPU to generate the most frequent rendering commands on its own. Read about Vulkan Device-Generated Commands on the NVIDIA Blog.

ReFLEX CES, a leading European-based provider of custom embedded and complex systems, will showcase its expertise in the design and manufacture of complex FPGA network accelerator cards at the Super Computing 2016 tradeshow. Highlights of the booth include Networking & Processing FPGA boards, Instant-DevKits and OpenCL demos. ReFLEX CES will demonstrate High Performance Computing OpenCL BSP (Board Support Package) based on various Altera Arria 10 base boards. Visit Khronos in Booth #304 at SC16.